Our Fixation with Jacob’s Ladder
Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Wisdom of Solomon 12:13, 16:19
In this week’s Lectionary text set, we begin with the oft-told tale of Jacob’s dream of a ladder that rested on the earth and reached up into the heaven. Maybe this sort of dream can only be generated in our brains when your head is using a stone for a pillow and it functions like some sort of magical portal, or perhaps it is simply that we are more receptive to hearing from God when we are uncomfortable. Either way, humans have loved this imagery and this particular story for millenia. It makes one heck of a flannel board story for kids, right? We love to imagine the angels of God going up and down the ladder. I think we like to draw on this image when we want to understand how to connect with God, how to get to Heaven, how to transcend this human life we are living below. We spend a lot of time and energy investing in this imagery, which is interesting because this is not even the best part of the story or the passage.
What we sometimes forget is in the dream, the Lord was standing RIGHT BESIDE Jacob, and that the Lord identifies Himself as “he LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac” (Genesis 28:13a). If we read this correctly, Jacob actually sees the Lord in his dream. Wow! That is huge! Seeing the Lord puts Jacob on a very short list of humans who behold the Lord.
And then the Lord makes some life-altering promises:
“…the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you” (Genesis 28:13b-15).
This is amazing. These promises change the trajectory of humanity in ways that connect to our own time and our lives today. Jacob could have hardly imagined what the Lord meant when He said, “your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth” (vs. 14) of how these descendants would literally cover the four directions of the earth, and that we would indeed be blessed by these promises in our own time. We might well imagine that Jacob would jump up, run home and tell his family what happened.
But no. That is not what Jacob does at all. Instead of announcing the good news the Lord announced, Jacob gets fixated on the fact that the Lord appeared in that specific place, so he uses his pillow stone as the beginnings of a pillar on which he pours oil. He decides that this place is where God resides and that there is a gate to heaven to boot. He names the place Bethel, or House of God, and displaces the original name of the city, Luz, which might have referred to almond trees or to a rocky spine on a mountain top. He seems to lose track of all those amazing promises in the midst of claiming this territory for God.
And if we are honest, we probably would have done something similar. Because, like Jacob, what we get fixated on is this darned magic ladder and the direct access to God we are craving. We like the idea of knowing exactly where God is located and want to be able to go there. Humans tend to want a god that is easily accessible and can be confined to a familiar space. We hanker after that old Tabernacle presence we read about where God’s presence was visible in the day and in the night as a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire.
So the song we love from this passage is about the darned ladder. And we tell our spellbound children about the angels going up and down. We make short shrift of those complicated promises because those are hard to convert to coloring pages. We can hardly cast judgment on Jacob since at the 2023 EP Gathering, we recently sang the spiritual, “Jacob’s Ladder” and I loved every minute of it.
It is somewhat unnerving to think of God knowing us in the ways that the passage from Psalm 139:1-12; 23-24 describes our relationship and His deep intimacy with us in each moment of life, including when we lay down, when we get up, when we make decisions, and when we are lost in the dark. We prefer to be certain of God’s physical presence and we are also both reassured and uncomfortable when we recall that God has searched us and knows us, that our motives and thoughts are clear to God, that God is always with us and that there is nowhere we can go to escape God’s presence.
And maybe you are like me and have to chuckle nervously at the turn of phrase, “See IF there is any wicked way in me” in verse 24 as if there were any question of my wickedness (Just ask my kids and my friends; they will readily confirm it.). And it is clear that God is very familiar with all of my ways, too (vs. 139:3). This is evidence of the mercy of God, to be sure.
But I am very thankful that although this knowledge is indeed “too wonderful for me, so high I cannot attain it” (vs 139:6), we have been adopted into Jacob’s family, that we are now heirs to the promise (Romans 8:15-17), that together we can cry, “Abba! Father!” (vs. 15) and that our cry will be heard. We wait eagerly for our full adoption, for the redemption of our bodies (vs. 23) and we “wait for what we do not see [and] we wait for it with patience” (vs 25) in hope of God’s reconciliation of all things, including the likes of us. Thanks be to God!